Ins and outs of the offseason

With Greg Oden choosing to throw his lot, and balky knees, in with Miami, the Spurs’ offseason has reached its apparent conclusion. There’s still the matter of their 15th roster slot. But with the usual re-treads and not-yets who fill that role, the major decisions have been made.

Well, not exactly major. The Spurs swapped out their seventh- and 10th-leading scorers for a project big man and a reserve guard who is collecting NBA jerseys at a rate suitable for a museum curator. As such, the basic DNA of the team remains unchanged.

It’s probably been an uneventful summer when Belinelli’s your biggest acquisition. Such was the case with the Spurs, who focused their efforts on re-signing Manu Ginobili and Tiago Splitter before adding the Italian operaio to offset the impending loss of Gary Neal. The fact that this will be Belinelli’s fifth team in seven seasons is a telling gauge of his skills: Not good enough to stick anywhere, but good enough that NBA teams keep giving him jobs.

An interesting tidbit: Despite not being known as a gifted shooter, Belinelli’s career 3-point percentage (38.7) is almost identical to Neal’s (39.8). Add the fact that he’s a competent ballhandler and playmaker, with decent size, and the Spurs have added a dependably mediocre reserve guard who can do just enough on offense to offset his liabilities as a defender and a rebounder.

How obscure is Pendergraph? He didn’t even warrant a player capsule at Gothic Ginobili, a site that takes completism to new heights. Having failed to make any notes of my own during the rare instances I caught his former team, the Pacers, in garbage time, all I’ve got to go on are stats, scouting reports and new Spurs assistant Frank Boylen, who reportedly endorsed his signing.

Perhaps the most interesting tidbit is the comment R.C. Buford made about Pendergraph’s ability to knock down mid-range jumpers, a spot from which he shot slightly better than the league average (41.0 percent) on nearly two attempts per game. Considering he only appeared in 37 outings last year, at 10 minutes a pop, that’s not much to go on. But at less than $2 million per season, the Spurs felt it was worth trying to coax something out of a player who, at 26, might still have room to grow.

We’ll lump the two former Spurs together because the paths they charted in San Antonio were so similar.

Both arrived from the margins of basketball, Neal as a free agent who had been forced to grind in Europe after a false rape accusation in college, Blair as a second-round pick whose fantastic production at Pitt wasn’t enough to offset concerns about his lack of size and ACLs. Both showed elite potential in critical areas, Neal as a 3-point shooter and Blair as a rebounder. And both were jettisoned after their production in those areas declined.

Neal can at least blame injuries, which ruined any rhythm he might have developed in his third season in San Antonio. He started off well enough, scoring 29 points in a December game at Houston that pushed his scoring average to nearly 13 a game. Then came the mishaps, which caused him to force shots like Kobe Bryant. But with only a Gary Neal skill set, the Spurs decided Belinelli was a better option.

With Blair, it came down to physical limitations, specifically the lack of size that prevented him from providing a defensive presence, in which turn opposing offense played better when he was on the court in each of his four seasons with the Spurs. Add the lack of range on his shot, and there just wasn’t enough there to augment prodigious rebounding, especially as his rate dipped from freakish to merely excellent.